Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/348

 332 HISTORY" OF GREECE. oneness and indivisibility is not less uncertified in regard tc Messenia than in regard to Laconia. How large a proportion of the former territory these kings of Stenyklerus may have ruled, we have no means of determining, but there were certainly por- tions of it which they did not rule, not merely during the reign of Teleklus at Sparta, but still later, during the first Messenian war. For not only are we informed that Teleklus established three townships, Poieessa, Echeiae, 1 and Tragium, near the Mes- senian gulf, and on the course of the river Nedon, but we read also a farther matter of evidence in the roll of Olympic victors. Every competitor for the prize at one of these great festivals was always entered as member of some autonomous Hellenic commu- nity, which constituted his title to approach the lists ; if success- ful, he was proclaimed with the name of the community to which he belonged. Now during the first ten Olympiads, seven winners are proclaimed as Messenians ; in the llth Olympiad, we find the name of Oxythemis Korona?us, Oxythemis, not of Koroneia in Jkeotia, but of Korone in the western bend of the Messenian gulf, 8 did not rule over it before the second Messenian war. they never acquired it at all. But on reference to the passage in Strabo, it will not be found to prove anything to the point ; for Strabo is speaking, not of the Messenian Pylus, but of the Triphyliun Pylus : he takes pains to show that Nestor had nothing to do with the Messenian Pylus, Ncerropof uTtoyovot means the inhabitants of Triphylia, near Lepreum : compare p. 350. 1 Strabo, viii. p. 360. Concerning the situation of Korone, in the Messe- nian gulf, see Pausanias, iv. 34, 2 ; Strabo, viii. p. 361 ; and the observations of Colonel Leake, Travels in Morea, ch. x. vol. i. pp. 439-448. He placei it near the modern PetaUdhi, seemingly on good grounds. (in the Chronological Table subjoined to his History of the Dorians) calls this victor, Oxythemis ofKordneia, in Boeotia. But this is inadmissible, on two grounds : 1. The occurrence of a Boeotian competitor in that early day a* the Olympic games. The first eleven victors (I put aside Oxythemis, because he is the subject of the argument) are all from western and southern Peloponnesus ; then come victors from Corinth, Megara, and Epidaurus ; then from Athens ; there is one from Thebes in the 41st Olympiad. I infer from hence that the celebrity and frequentation of the Olympic games increased only by degrees, and had not got beyond Peloponnesus in tlic eighth century B. c. 2. The name Coronaius, Kopuvalo?, is the proper ntul formal title for a citizen of Korone, not for a citizen of Koroneia : the latter gtyles himself Kopuveve. The ethnical name Kopavevf, as belonging to Kwoneia in Bceotin, is placed beyond doubt by several inscriptions in Bocckh's
 * See Mr. Clinton's Chronological Tables for the year 732 B. c. ; 0. Mallei